The wages of anti-vaxxing
Some of the people Fox News is killing:
The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.
Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for 95 percent of Greene County’s new cases, according to Towns. It is spreading easily because people have ditched their masks, crowded into indoor spaces, resumed travel, and resisted vaccinations. Just 40 percent of people in Greene County are fully vaccinated. In some nearby counties, less than 20 percent of people are.
Why? Partly because they’ve been told vaccinations are for Democrats – in other words it’s tribal. Their tribe is wimpy and gets the Fauci ouchy, our tribe is tough and hell no we don’t get no stinkin’ vaccination.
Almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield’s hospitals is unvaccinated, and the dozen or so exceptions are all either elderly or immunocompromised people. The vaccines are working as intended, but the number of people who have refused to get their shots is crushing morale. Vaccines were meant to be the end of the pandemic. If people don’t get them, the actual end will look more like Springfield’s present: a succession of COVID-19 waves that will break unevenly across the country until everyone has either been vaccinated or infected…
That they are in this position despite the wide availability of vaccines turns difficult days into unbearable ones. As bad as the winter surge was, Springfield’s health-care workers shared a common purpose of serving their community, Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of CoxHealth, told me. But now they’re “putting themselves in harm’s way for people who’ve chosen not to protect themselves,” he said. While there were always ways of preventing COVID-19 infections, Missourians could have almost entirely prevented this surge through vaccination—but didn’t. “My sense of hope is dwindling,” Tracy Hill, a nurse at Mercy, told me. “I’m losing a little bit of faith in mankind. But you can’t just not go to work.”
Tucker Carlson, take a bow. Lauren Boebert, step up.
The grueling slog is harder now because it feels so needless, and because many patients don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late.
…
Missouri Governor Mike Parson never issued a statewide mask mandate, and the state’s biggest cities—Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, and Columbia—ended their local orders in May, after the CDC said that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks indoors. In June, Parson signed a law that limits local governments’ ability to enact public-health restrictions. And even before the pandemic, Missouri ranked 41st out of all the states in terms of public-health funding. “We started in a hole and we’re trying to catch up,” Towns, the director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, told me.
Well, that’s unfortunate, but at least Trump and Tucker Carlson have had a lot of fun.
And see what is, and will be, happening in Britain, with the government lifting all restrictions this Monday. Already, anyway, there is great spike in cases as a result of the government’s letting the Delta (or ‘Johnson’) variant freely to enter the country – it would of course have come in anyway, but not to the crippling extent that it has. Hospitals are already having difficulties. What appalls me most is the total lack of respect or sympathy for hospital workers who have over the last year and a half had the most terrible time, with many catching COVID themselves and many also dying. There is the usual mouth-service to ‘our wonderful NHS’, but this is being drowned out by unintelligent right-wing Tories (of whom Johnson is afraid) banging on about ‘freedom’ in parliament.
Did no one explain to these people the extreme horribleness of dying from a respiratory impairment? (Maybe, but they convinced them COVID-19 was a hoax and they weren’t going to die from it.) Having had a near fatal asthma attack about 20 years ago, one that I cannot forget, I was so angry at the lack of restrictions in our state. Our governor is so Trumpista, I was surprised when he put some restrictions on Lincoln and Omaha. Our City Council put a mask mandate in place when our hospital was too full to admit more, and lifted it only about a month and a half later because people didn’t like it. We had an immediate spike in cases. And we, like many other places, now have the Delta variant.
I’m not, since that would require me to have some to begin with..
That’s exactly it iknlast. I remember seeing a tweet months back from a nurse saying what a shattering shift she’d just come off. A patient who from time of admission onward refused to believe they had covid and were convinced that the staff were lying to them and refusing to treat them for whatever disease they actually had. Angry, abusive, railing against the world, rather than spending time while they could with family and friends (by video/audio I guess). Eventually being intubated and eventually dying, presumably still angry and disbelieving. The nurse was saying she’d experienced multiple such patients angry and disbelieving. I can only imagine it’s got worse as covid/vaccine stance has become an article faith now.
I can’t recall if Ophelia blogged about that tweet or not. I saw it several places.
There will be a relative die-off of conservatives as a direct result of them choosing to make vaccination a political issue. Oh well, that’s the bed they chose.
May more or less cancel out their voter suppression efforts.
Bjarte
Only if you assume there’s no such thing as negative faith in humanity. It’s irrational, at this stage, to assume that.
At some point I can only say “I got nothing left.” While my heart goes out to the medicl staff for whom whis is nonending, much less of it goes to the people who can’t trace cause and effect back to a vaccination beating a virus.
No one knows what is behind Fox’s push against the vaccine other than a stiff defense of individual freedom.
A CREED FOR THESE TIMES: I believe in Donald Trump, maker of bullshit galore. And in Boris Johnson his political bastard son and forelock tugger; who was conceived by a holey condom, born God only knows where, suffered prep-school fagging and got crucified at every turn by his housemaster and the liberal press. He descended into Hell. After three days he arose, and ascended into Westminster, where he holds forth like God Almighty, and from whence he shall come to judge those multitudes quicker than he. I believe in Hamlet’s ghost, the holy collapsing church, its forgiveness of its own sins and in the life of the world to come after climate change and Covid-19, which are just beat-ups anyway, and cannot be allowed, as they are bad for business. Amen.
I have a very very minor breathing issue that manifests mostly when I’m exerting myself, and then only in a non-life-threatening way. However, it does restrict my O2 pickup at those times, and let me tell you, it’s terrifying. Part of that is that this somewhat age-related condition is new to my somewhat recently-older body (I’ve been thinking of myself as 25 years old and invincible until my recent 55-year-old birthday), and part of it is that I’m just sort of naturally panicky, but the feeling of not being able to breathe enough is just viscerally frightening to me. So I cannot even begin to fucking imagine how terrified and alone the covid-19 patients with wrecked lungs are feeling, or how someone can possibly risk being brought to that state of being when there are three (four?!) effective vaccines out there. It’s impressively stupid in the way that only hidebound idiots of the human species can be, and no I’m not afraid to go there. The only thing that I can imagine that would be more terrifying would be to drown–like, three meters of water over your head, gasping for air and gulping in lungfuls of water while struggling to reach the light playing on the waves just overhead, arms and legs flailing, knowing that you’re dying, and right quick at that. Anyone who self-selects that for themselves on the say-so of a Tucker Carlson talking head is stupid beyond belief.
Pop on over to Friendly Atheist. It is just shocking what is being peddled out there! Even California, which done “relatively” well on the Vax front, is seeing a surge. From the same population of religious nimrods and political nonsense cretins, but they are enough of the population even in urban California to represent a true threat.
James Garnett: Bosh man. You just need to join the “transchronological” movement. Squawk loudly when the supermarket clerk doesn’t demand a photo id to buy beer or a lottery ticket. You have been “stabbed in the stomach with a knife” by the heartless Transchronophobe clerk.
There is a line about the indivisibility of freedom. Well, the same appears to apply to denialism. Denialism with regard to climate change (anthropogenic global warming) dovetails neatly with denialism of Covid-19, which ‘conservatives’ have maintained is no worse than ordinary old winter flu. Thus the website most associated with the electorally-challenged, neanderthal right wing (sorry for that insult, neanderthals) of the ruling COALiton of the Liberal Party and the National (read mining) Party here in Australia, led by chucked-out former PM Tony ‘climate change is crap’ Abbott. Read its denialist propaganda at https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/07/none-will-be-sane-until-all-are-sane/
TIP: Keep a bucket handy.